Chris Hadfield shares the everyday sounds of space on SoundCloud

If you thought Chris Hadfield's retirement announcement meant an end to the world's favourite
astronaut endearing himself to us with his social media prowess and David Bowie covers, how wrong you
were. In his latest exploit, the Canadian has teamed up with SoundCloud to show the world what life on the
Internaional Space Station sounds like.

There's some tinkering, the whirring of fans and a heck of a lot
of ambient noise that sounds an awful lot like a building site.
(It's no wonder the Twitter favourite had to take a timeout to
strum some Bowie on his guitar in zero gravity.) Speaking about his
love of guitars in the embedded video, Hadfield goes a way in
explaining how sharing the sounds and sights of the ISS with the
world was his way of connecting with the Earth so far below him,
offering some insight about how it all felt through a means most
familiar to him.

"I've always had a guitar with me anywhere I've gone in life --
when I first went up to the Russian space station Mir, I had to
convince Nasa it would be a good gift to give. I had to modify it
and cut the neck in half so it would fold and fit in the shuttle
locker... It's really wonderful to have the touch and the familiar
comforting sounds of a guitar when you're so far from home."

The
most hellishly noisy sound that's ever been described as
"ambient"

Hadfield, in orbit on his last stint aboard the ISS for six
months, was fascinated by the daily sounds of the ISS, sounds that
so clearly distinguished how alien his environment was to home on a
daily basis. With his son Evan back on Earth, he began recording
and storing all those intricacies.

"So much of what we know and think and feel is affiliated with
how it all sounded," he says.

"I really became aware of it when I was onboard, the difference
as you floated from one module to another, as you pulled your
sleeping quarters shut. The transitions of noise. How a familiarity
of noise really defines a time and place for you. Space stations
are pretty noisy -- in some places, when you're next to rotating
machinery like the treadmill, or the carbon dioxide removal system
or the toilet when it's running, it's pretty high decibels. And
there's always the drone of machinery because we need fans and
pumps to keep the atmosphere pure and not have pockets of used up
air build up because heat doesn't rise, there's no natural mixing
of the air. Space station is inherently noisy like living in a
factory or a machine."

Here you can hear a "ticking", which Hadfield
suspects is the hull expanding and contracting as the vessel passes
by the Sun and heats and cools

Hadfield goes on to explain how he found solace in the sleeping
quarters where decibels remained in the low 40s, and how returning
to Earth was a "tumult" compared to the "monastic laboratory" he
had enjoyed for six months.

"Landing back on Earth was pretty crazy -- when you first come
thumping and crashing back down your first meeting is with people
pulling you out of the spaceship carrying you over, plonking you
down and you're surrounded by 50 people, suddenly... It's quite a
transition, it's a big sound assault."

Hadfield's ISS soundbites -- ranging from him floating between
modules, banging on handrails in the Russian module or listening to
what has to be the noisiest toilet of all time -- are
representative of what SoundCloud can really achieve. It's not just
about music discovery, it can be about space discovery -- and if
its benefits can stretch that far, the Berlin startup is probably
hoping to inspire a generation of sound-sharing junkies,
compartmentalising experiences into five minute audio clips. But no
toilet flushing please, Hadfield is the only man to pull off making
a loo interesting.